We are living in exciting times.  The rearrangement of how we receive and exchange news has wrought great changes in the way we think and act.  There was a time when Americans wore American flags on the seats of their pants and it upset many but there were no riots over this act of desecration. The hairy, sloppy and iconoclastic hippies and Yippies made a lot of Americans unhappy but there were no laws seriously intended to make the American Flag into a sacred object. We are a religious but not a monolithically religious country.  No one group tells the rest of us how we should believe and how to demonstrate our faith.  In fact having no faith at all might be a sign that someone at least has used his or her brain instead of opting into the current belief system.

What most of us miss is that American Flags are burning in many places all over the world. We cannot legislate against the people who think that America is the great Satan and the flag is Satan’s sign.  What Americans really miss seeing and hearing is the impossible things that other peoples really BELIEVE! They literally (well, many Americans believe in the same way) believe that the Koran is the word of God received by Mohammad and transcribed by him into the suras that make up that “holy” document.  To flush a copy of the Koran down the toilet, according to Newsweek would be a desecration IF it happened.  It was however an error in reporting. An apology was made. This will not be believed by the Muslim/Arab Street and no one in the Arab world will apologize for burning the Flag.

A flag is just a symbol and the Koran is just a book.  To invest them with the power to send armies in their defense or to attack others who have different symbols makes one remember the Nazi Swastika. This twisted cross terrorized its victims. The ancient design is found amongst many peoples as a border of interlocking angles but today only the sick and the haters remember it fondly in the same way they celebrate Hitler’s birthday.

It is sad to see how the American political process works to bulwark the power of these symbols.  The American President is burned in effigy and American flags are burning in countries that revere the Koran.  The American nation is scrambling as a people to apologize for the action of an alleged flushing by a prison guard. We know it to be a hoax but this alleged incident has intensified the killing of Americans in foreign lands. The deaths of rioters whose reaction to this alleged insult caused them to run amok and has become a commonplace thing.

The Flag is just a flag and the Koran is just a book. Most understand this.